My views on religion

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wrong.

not only could it be concluded from the reaction of the person smacked in the face, but there is also brain activity that correlates to pain so those light up as well and the results are reproducible!

The reaction could be programmed to occur without any actual pain experienced. Even if there was brain activity there would still be no way to prove that it correlates to a real feeling of pain. The electrical activity could be just another programmed response.

I can only know my own experience of pain. That other people experience the same subjective sensation as I do can't be empirically determined.

that's cute and all, but you're acting like no one's ever studied the brain before and that's just an out and out lie and entirely inaccurate with regards to not knowing what areas of the brain do what.

Please, you don't want to get me started on what I consider (in agreement with Daniel Dennett) the BS notion of Qualia. The brain activity IS the experience of pain.

What certainty you have that your own senses are less illusory than that which they reveal. The solipsist's error is the assumption of his own existence, after all. His deeper error is that his dogmatism-by-exclusion halts the process of investigation.

Pious Atheist? How can someone who has no religious beliefs exhibit the very religious trait of piety? In fact I'm fairly sure it is mentioned in Christianity as a spiritual virtue. Piety for whom? If not for the "dead god," then I must assume it is reserved for Mammon. (Google it.)

I said no such thing. You must have completely missed what I said.

Hint: he's referring to the problem of other minds. Empirically, we cannot know that others are not functioning zombies and actually are as human as we are.

In being a very devout Pyrrhonist.

Read it. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, wore it out, used it as a rag, lost it, cat had her kittens on it five years later.

WTF is a Prryhonist?

I'm not saying I'm a solipsist. Only that solipsism can't be empirically disproved. The whole notion of subjective experience is not empirical. That’s why hard-core Positivists like Daniel Dennet claim it doesn’t exist. Yet it would be hard for me to deny that I experience pain when someone smacks me in the face.

I think the true dogmatism is the notion of a universal objective reality outside of epistemological context. Our brains like to think in terms of a single universal truth while it may be that reality consists of independent truths that only exist relative to the method employed in deriving them.

No more than you can disprove the validity of your observations. In fact, you can as easily disbelieve in your own subjective experience, believing only that you are a puppet of your environment. It's called fatalism. You too can believe that you are a robot, driven in your every action by environmental stimuli, feeling nothing and thinking nothing that wasn't put there by your surroundings. Conservative thinkers LOVE this kind of thinking, by the way. It's quite flawed, to be sure, but it has formed the basis for conservative thought in the US for several years. It draws sociopaths and narcissists like moths to a flame.

How sure are you of your subjective thoughts, though? Are they as firmly rooted in being as you have always thought them to be? Or are your subjective thoughts no more indicative of a "self" than the moaning of wind about its obstacles constitutes a horde of brain-eating zombies? How deeply have you really explored your sense of self? Does the process of investigation come to a close merely because you have chosen to favor a belief?

Ah, but you have commited dogmatism, yourself, in saying with such certainty what you believe the "true dogmatism" is. Tut-tut. A fun way of avoiding dogmatism is to exercise favor for words like "suggests" or "supports." This is how the pros do it, you know.

Perhaps, but I am unsure as to how well supported this idea is. If you would, please, expand upon this, so we can further investigate its ramifications.

I believe in both religion and science. The fact is, the odds of the amino acids necessary for something as complicated as a human arising through random generation of said amino acids are roughly the same as a monkey pounding out Shakespeare's entire works by pressing random keys on a typewriter. So, clearly there was some greater power that did it. That's just my opinion, though.

Can a person not assume themselves? Existence implies itself and by referring to a solipsist, any consistent system would demand a solipsist to exist.

How can a solipsist be considered to be in error? It is not a disprovable hypothesis, and would be pretty hard to prove as well.

I consider the notion of philosophical zombies to be nonsense because the notion contains inherent dualistic assumptions about consciousness.

that's philosophical BS and insanity.


let me know when you get back to talking about reality.